‘Your case,’ he said, ’is one of the most singular, delicate, and distressing which I have met in the course of my experience.  There is no objection to character, and poverty is not the impediment:  the reverse.  You will permit me, no doubt, to consult my partner, Mr. Merton; we have naturally no secrets between us, and he possesses a delicacy of touch and a power of insight which I can only regard with admiring envy.  It was he who carried to a successful issue that difficult case in the family of the Sultan of Mingrelia (you will observe that I use a fictitious name).  I can assure you, Lord Embleton, that polygamy presents problems almost insoluble; problems of extreme delicacy—­or indelicacy.’

‘I had not heard of that affair,’ said the Earl.  ’Like Eumaeus in Homer and in Mr. Stephen Phillips, I dwell among the swine, and come rarely to the city.’

‘The matter never went beyond the inmost diplomatic circles,’ said Logan.  ’The Sultan’s favourite son, the Jam, or Crown Prince, of Mingrelia (Jamreal, they called him), loved four beautiful Bollachians, sisters—­again I disguise the nationality.’

‘Sisters!’ exclaimed the peer; ’I have always given my vote against the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill; but four, and all alive!’

‘The law of the Prophet, as you are aware, is not monogamous,’ said Logan; ’and the Eastern races are not averse to connections which are reprobated by our Western ideas.  The real difficulty was that of religion.

   ’Oh, why from the heretic girl of my soul
   Should I fly, to seek elsewhere an orthodox kiss?’

hummed Logan, rather to the surprise of Lord Embleton.  He went on:  ’It is not so much that the Mingrelians object to mixed marriages in the matter of religion, but the Bollachians, being Christians, do object, and have a horror of polygamy.  It was a cruel affair.  All four girls, and the Jamreal himself, were passionately attached to each other.  It was known, too, that, for political reasons, the maidens had received a dispensation from the leading Archimandrite, their metropolitan, to marry the proud Paynim.  The Mingrelian Sultan is suzerain of Bollachia; his native subjects are addicted to massacring the Bollachians from religious motives, and the Bollachian Church (Nestorians, as you know) hoped that the four brides would convert the Jamreal to their creed, and so solve the Bollachian question.  The end, they said, justified the means.’

‘Jesuitical,’ said the Earl, shaking his head sadly.

‘That is what my friend and partner, Mr. Merton, thought,’ said Logan, ’when we were applied to by the Sultan.  Merton displayed extraordinary tact and address.  All was happily settled, the Sultan and the Jamreal were reconciled, the young ladies met other admirers, and learned that what they had taken for love was but a momentary infatuation.’

The Earl sighed, ‘Renovare dolorem!  My family,’ said he, ’is, and has long been—­ever since the Gunpowder Plot—­firmly, if not passionately, attached to the Church of England.  The Prince of Scalastro is a Catholic.’